Innovating Financial Aid

Five years ago, the UIA secured funding to scale completion grants across our network. Georgia State was an early pioneer of completion grants, micro-grants awarded to students facing a financial hurdle that prevents them from registering for classes in the final few semesters of their academic experience. Rather than losing a likely graduate, GSU simply places the necessary funds (less than $1,000) in the student’s account to ensure they can register for classes. For years, we had heard and seen wonderful examples of success from Georgia State’s program, and thankfully Ascendium Education Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up to support replicating and learning from this model at an array of institutions across the country. We learned really important lessons about how to implement this innovative intervention and 5,000 students across 11 campuses benefited from our teamwork.

Last fall, we released our Completion Grants Playbook featuring key insights from our project and examples of how universities removed minor financial barriers that were causing outsized harm. Today, I want to share the most exciting thing that has happened as a result. When the UIA added our first new campuses, we were able to provide grant funding and the playbook to help them scale up completion grants. One of those campuses – North Carolina A&T – mobilized at warp speed to implement completion grants in two months! We’d never seen an institution move that quickly to take an outside idea and implement it with fidelity to impact students, but NC A&T managed to use a small amount of funding ($50,000) and the project playbook to identify internal matching resources and award 55 completion grants in the span of two meetings. For us, this validated our confidence that playbooks can work! Our goal all along was to make innovation easier and faster for other institutions that want to do the brave and bold work necessary for student success. This important milestone with NC A&T helped us learn how to support others in scaling what we learn, and also showed us that we shouldn’t overestimate the time it takes to implement new ideas. When there’s real need, change can happen quickly.

This month we are hosting a webinar with the Chronicle of Higher Education about innovating financial aid strategies. In that conversation, we will discuss completion grants, emergency aid, and key tactics that can help any institution be more innovative in how they prevent financial hardships from impeding student attainment. Please join us to learn about our experiences and share your own!